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Tim:
David, talk a little bit about what Apache CloudStack is.
Obviously, there are tons of software offerings, let’s say,
with the word Cloud in it. Apache CloudStack starts with Apache. I
want you to talk about the significance of that.

David
Nalley: So Apache CloudStack is a project that is at the Apache
Software Foundation. It’s a top-level project there. And of
course, that means the Apache Software Foundation provides a home
from a legal perspective. It also provides a little bit of the
culture, the Apache way that folks have solemnized over a period of
time. And it kind of sets norms for our community both from what we
produce in a legal sense as far as releases as well as how we operate
the transparency, the meritocracy—all of that comes with being
an Apache project.

Tim:
Now there are a couple of different levels of contributors,
people who actually have quite a bit of interest in open-source
project, but talk about the organization of CloudStack a little bit.
How many people are there involved at each of the big levels?

David
Nalley: So, there are essentially three levels. The first level
is developers, who are contributing code or documentation or some
other form of contribution to the project. When we talk about those
169 people, I think, who contributed to the code base in the past 12
months. There are other people who have contributed in other means.
The level above that though is to be a committer which essentially
means you’ve the right to commit directly into the repo. You
can push there as opposed to having to submit a patch for review.
After that of course comes the body of PMC, which is the next level
up. It lets committers, after they’ve earned some trust and
earned some merit in the projects. So you can’t get it because
of your employer, you can’t get in because you are special and
awesome. You have to prove yourself to the community over time. And
then the level above that is the project management committee. And
that particular body has binding ______for decisions and for things
like releases, so when we decide to release the software, the people
who have binding input to that decision are the PMC numbers. And
there are – those two are responsible ultimately for the health
of the project, ensuring that it’s continuing to move forward
and setting guidance etc.

Tim:
Explain a little bit what is your role within the project.

David
Nalley: So, I’m a project management committee member and
I’ve been – I originally came from Cloud.com before the
acquisition, before the move to the ASF, I was involved with the
project then. When we made the move to the ASF, I ended up coming on
the project management committee.

Tim:
Would you clarify for people who don’t know the project
very much that acquisition with Citrix.

David
Nalley: Yeah. So, Cloud.com started. They were writing software.
It was open source, but it was under the GPLv3 license at the time.
And that company was acquired by Citrix. Citrix then changed the
licensing to the Apache Software license and then shortly, thereafter
proposed that could be entered into the Apache incubator.

Tim:
And then it became a top-level project which is a fairly small
number of the Apache Software Project _____?

David
Nalley: So, there are – I think right now, there are 151
top-level projects at the Apache Software Foundation. We are one of
those incubations, it took us around a year. So we were in
incubation; essentially that doesn’t reflect on the quality or
maturity of the code as much as it does onhave you gone
through all of the software and made sure it conforms to the IP
policies that the foundation has. Have you demonstrated that you are
able to manage the project in a way that’s acceptable to the
foundation? Have you grown the community so that there is true
diversity in the community and it’s not a single entity that
controls it?

David
Nalley: Sure. So the difference between CloudStack and OpenStack,
is really kind of design principles. So CloudStack and OpenStack were
first written in different languages. OpenStack was written in
Python, CloudStack was written in Java. OpenStack is also a
collection of services that are distinct, discrete modules, and so
you can buy collections of those to build a service. The scope of
OpenStack is also much greater. So they have services like object
storage. And the scope of CloudStack is much narrower and rather than
having collections of modules, we have a little more monolithic model
that’s made a little more flexible with the plug-in system but
it’s still rather monolithic in comparison to OpenStack.

Tim:
Being monolithic does that mean it’s a simple process to
install it on your hardware?

David
Nalley: So setting up a cloud is never an easy process, right?
You are orchestrating compute resources storage and networking—that’s
never going to be as easy as installing say OpenOffice. At the same
time I think there are fewer moving pieces in a CloudStack install
and I think that makes it a little simpler, but it depends upon what
your end goal is, I think. Those are two different approaches,
neither one is necessarily bad, just different design philosophies.

Tim:
One of the things you just mentioned is being available as a sort
of a built-in or default thing in OpenStack that is handled
separately in CloudStack is object storage, as an example, how would
someone who wants to implement object storage do it but they’re
using CloudStack instead?

David
Nalley: So CloudStack doesn’t provide object storage at all
if you wanted to use object storage with CloudStack, so CloudStack
can use make use and consume object storage and it supports the S3
API... we support the OpenStack Swift API. So if you set up Swift,
CloudStack can consume that object storage. If you set up something
like Ceph and expose their S3 API support, CloudStack can easily
consume that, and so where consumers of object storage we don’t
provide it all, that interaction Swift is a perfectly valid object
storage model, and we happily consume that as well as couple of
others out there, so

Tim:
So you focus on the computation

David
Nalley: We do. Our focus is very tight on compute, and so that
really is just CPU and RAM. We can’t get away from
connectivity, so you got to have some networking and then we also
have a need for storage to consume storage, not to provide it per se.
And so we focus on interacting with network and compute as well, so
that’s hypervisor _____ bare metal, technically, are containers
and that gives us – that much smaller scope I think makes
things a little bit easier on it.

Tim:
Let me ask you about hypervisor support, talk a little bit about
what hypervisors are available as options?

David
Nalley: And so for the current release of CloudStack we support
the VMware we have the center, we support XenServer, KVM, we will
support LXC and Hyper-V as well. Neither was one I was forgetting
this because I am at a Linux stall, I can’t mention a Microsoft
product. In the upcoming release some folks have worked on adding in
support for O VM-3. O VM-3 which is Oracle VM manager, and that
should be in the next release of CloudStack and there are some work
going on right now around Docker in trying to figure out how to use
software in the right way, using it just as a container is pretty
easy, but we have that kind of functionality with LXC. Figuring out
how the model benefits from Docker, in an infrastructure as a service
platform API is something we’re trying to get right, if we
don’t want to get that wrong then have to support it for years
down the road. But that’s kind of where we are from a
hypervisors standpoint. The non-hypervisor that we support is also
bare metal, and so if your hardware has IPMI support or your Cisco
UCS we can orchestrate that as if they were hypervisor.

Tim:
Just one more thing, can you talk about some people we’re
using CloudStack right now. There are some pretty big names that
have used CloudStack installs.

David
Nalley: There are. Tell me where you want to start, so obviously
there is telecom, be that British Telecom, Alcatel-Lucent, there’s
Orange has – Orange in France and Orange in Switzerland have
installed, Korea Telecom has a massive ______ViaTel has a large
deployment. Then you move into more of the private cloud and so
we’ve seen companies like Disney deploy CloudStack in a couple
of places. We’ve seen some of the larger gambling houses and
so like Paddy Power. Paddy Power is a gaming provider based out of
Ireland and if you’re placing bets or gambling on their site
you are doing that all through CloudStack.

CloudStack is open source, owned by the ASF, and you can totally host it yourself and make any changes you need.

Citrix has their Citrix CloudPlatform product based on the Apache CloudStack (ACS) source code, IBM might have their own product based on ACS (or SoftLayer), but at the end of the day, neither IBM's product or Citrix's product is ACS as neither company owns or controls the Apache Foundation.

While CloudStack is under an opensource license, Citrix is gaming the system to appear open while keeping a leach on what functionality goes into the mainstream form of this "open" project.

David Nalley brings up that the benefits of CloudStack being an Apache project is that it provides transparency and makes sure that no one company dominates the project. Both of these claims are misleading.

In reality, there is not the type of transparency you would like to have for something claiming to not allow any one

It's quite easy to get Apache CloudStack up and running. There are a few Docker containers for the ACS management server as well as Ansible Playbooks and Chef Cookbooks to deploy it for you, but the manual installation process can realistically be completed in less than an hour (provided a local mirror for things like System VM templates and the RPM/DEB packages).